From ‘Avalanche’ by Blaga Dimitrova (pp.18-20)
You’re in pursuit
The individual’s steps are always in pursuit of
someone or something.
You’re thinking who knows what is happening there
without you.
The others advance. Outstrip you.
They’re joyful.
But you, you’re angry to the point of tears.
Even though you’ve woken up early, you feel tarnished,
like you’ve overslept, like you’ve missed the freshest morning of your life.
Their way is intriguing, full of new things.
You fall behind. They’re getting away. They’re
climbing high.
But you’re still below, at the bottom.
They step onto a peak. The whole world is before them,
in the palm of their hand, and it belongs to them.
But you have nothing but your intent to reach them.
For the world is only habitable inside the circle of
their presence, their voices, their steps. Outside this space is chaos,
aimlessness, impenetrability.
Your tiny human solitude is much bigger than the great
solitude of the mountains.
They live intensively, in a common whole.
Your being is emptied.
They forget you. Without you they can.
But without them, you cannot.
You’re superfluous. You don’t exist.
You’re not pursuing them, but yourself.
Even when they rebuke you, ridicule you, renounce you –
they again confirm your existence.
They are WE. You are alone, I.
They are everything together.
You are nothing without them.
We
We, the group, are a special being.
We hardly think about you, punishing you for being
late, for staying behind.
If we think and discuss the situation, it would be an
even greater punishment for you. And you know that.
When we’re beyond your view, you suddenly see us in
our entirety, as if you’re discovering us for the first time.
We’re moving in a column as one. Conquering the
heights. Try to reach us!
Our feet in sturdy hiking books leave prints in the
freshly fallen snow. We advance in a line at a specified distance from one
another. Each of us deepens the traces of the one in front.
Your place has been filled. Occupied by another. And
once you lose your place in the line, where is your place in the world?
Our packed rucksacks aren’t yet weighing us down. Youthful
faces, flushed with joy. We feel our own glow as a warmth inside.
A common blood flows through our group. We won’t laugh
until you catch up with us. You’ll be pale, nervy, cut off from the flow of
Strong blood.
We’re overwhelmed by the mountain’s gravity, the
opposite of the earth’s, not downwards, but upwards. Maybe that’s the ancient
drive to resist the earth’s pull.
Imperceptibly, the snow absorbs the stains, the fumes,
the poisons that have filled our souls – and it cleanses us.
We stretch ourselves, as if we’ve been tied up and
finally given our freedom.
When the mountains turn white, we get the intoxicating
feeling that we are taking the very first steps here. The snow exudes a sense
of primacy.
We fill our lungs with deep breaths. Until yesterday
we were scattered, dispersed, drowned in the muddy concrete wells of the city.
Now we’ve come together, WE. A steady and self-confident being that no barrier
stops. All powerful in our collectivity, impenetrable to others from outside.
The other is not a being, but an element. It isn’t permitted.
We feel our coming together and the closing of our
circle as liberation.
Liberation from the state of “alert”, which always
tightly binds the singular entity in barbed wire: finding your own bearings in
a divergent world, conforming, not missing out, watching your back. And hardest
of all: not losing self-control.
Once we’ve grown into WE, responsibility is shared and
doesn’t weigh so heavily on us. We draw a breath.
Eh, discipline still has to be respected. But it is
far lighter than self-discipline.
Lightness – that’s a collective virtue.
The mountains swell beneath our steps. Above us only
sky, below us the abyss.
One impetus unites us. We walk one behind another,
brought together by the mountains. At a steady pace, which fills us with a
primordial pleasure in the walk itself.
Translated by Tom Phillips
